Malaysian Butoh

NOT Malaysian butoh, but Japanese (Sankaijuku)

I'm a huge fan of Japanese butoh, especially that performed by "Sankaijuku."  It's hard to explain, and I'm no authority on it by any means.  But it generally involves shaven-headed men covered in white paint from head to toe doing really slow, somewhat provocative movements, often to  sounds rather than music.  But is it really dance?  For lack of a better term, I'll call it that.  One thing is for sure -- to me it's completely arresting, captivating and memorable.  The images stick with me long after I've gone home.  It's rarely happy stuff; the dancers often appear to be tortured or in quiet agony, but that's part of what makes it so fascinating.

Again, Sankaijuku (photo stolen from the Web)

       I guess there are those who would call it grotesque, but fans of butoh might characterize it as thought-provoking and mind-boggling -- at least I do.

          By the way, I hear that the word "butoh" has a  totally different meaning in Bahasa Melayu, something to do with men's private parts.  So I hope I won't get anybody reading this post by accident, expecting something  else.   Please don't anybody censor this blog post!  This is art and culture we're talking about here.  Culture with a capital "C," I might add. . . .

Malaysian butoh (at a2 Gallery)

     Anyway, recently I was invited to "a2 Gallery," a gem of an art space right here in "downtown" Pulau Tikus, just beyond our traffic light where the non-stop traffic jam happens.  The gallery is in a restored Chinese house located in Lorong Bangkok, so named because the Thai Buddhist temple with a reclining Buddha is nearby.  (You could google that, too, if you wanted.)  Anyway, they had a performance of Malaysian butoh that was small-scale compared to Sankaijuku doing their thing in Tokyo, but it was fascinating and very well done, in my uneducated opinion. 

My deep apologies for not having his name!

   

With the mask or without it, he's still very cool!

     The main performers were a young gal who looked a little like an angry bird, and a  fellow who --   Well. . . . .  YOU tell ME what you think he looked like!  I'm still puzzling over it. ( See what I mean by "thought-provoking"?)  I must say that I think his real face was just as interesting as his masked persona, but in a different way.  And let me apologize here and now for not having the names of these two terrific performers.  It's really unfair for me not to have gotten them and put them right here, but I didn't.  

     But I do know the name of this gentleman-- well, now I do!  He's Lee Swee Keong, the founder of Nyoba Kan, Malaysia's only Butoh dance company.  I saw him by accident out at Straits Quay, where he was getting ready to perform at PenangPac, (Penang Performing Arts Center).  And, like a stupid idiot, I marched right up to him and gushed and asked him if he knew about Sankaijuku and forced him to look at my silly cell phone photos of the performance I'd seen.  Honestly, I had no idea who I was speaking to!  I can only hope that he found my naivete charming and fresh, not ignorant and bothersome, as he probably did.  He was pretty nice to me, though, so I guess he forgave me for not being star-struck, as I surely would have been, had I known who I was talking to.  
                                     Live and learn, I guess!

       If you ever have the opportunity to see butoh performed wherever you are, don't miss the chance.  It's a really special kind of  performance art of the body.